Feature Photography Exhibition: The Medium and Its Metaphors

Since the announcement of the invention of photography in 1839, artists and writers have often used potent metaphors to describe the medium’s unique qualities.

This exhibition pairs photographs from the museum’s permanent collection with a series of important critical metaphors that span the 1840s to the present: the Pencil of Nature, the Handmaiden, the Universal Currency, the Optical Unconscious, the Mirror and the Window, and the Secret within a Secret.